Retaliating Flames Guardian

After trying out a bunch of the builds in these forums, I was pretty disatisfied with the guardians balance between damage and support. My biggest problem with Guardian is that the grandmaster traits are pretty weak in my opinion, and while it might be nice to have the 30 points in a trait line, the traits themselves are kind of a letdown when I read their descriptions in builds. So, I sat down and looked at them and decided Virtues was the only line I really wanted three trait choices in and came up with this build:http://gw2skills.net...BVQ7DDEmCCMjuFA

The build kind of works like spiritbond monk builds from GW1. The idea behind it is to keep retaliation up 100% of the time by using your virtues and skills alternately while outhealing your oponents. Combined with the degen from area flame you can keep triggering as they die, you can outlive large groups as they kill themselves on you. You have two powerful condition removals, very good healing and ranged damge even while using the GS. Most of your enemies will degen at 1k per tic.

I am using carrion gear, sapphire jewelry, and a boon duration rune set. Besides just this build for PVE, I can tweak the trait choices and slot skills without having to do a full reset when I go into WvW and have a good support build using the same trait distrubtion and gear but subbing in a scepter/shield for the GS.

Here is a quick little video I made showing how it works against mobs and illustrating the passive damage of it:

You would have to give up the two handed weapon recharge time to get your toughness up to 10 for that trait, which isn't that big of a deal really since you have continual damage and you might be getting better DPS from the burn you would be causing more often. I probably won't because I want the 20 there when I change traits for WvW and don't want to have to reroll every time.

Justice with Renewed Focus is probably enough condition removal to get by if you wanted to swap out Purging Flames. You could also swap out the signet and do more damage with retaliation as a result. As is, it is probably overkill on healing and you could take another aegis with retreat and get around the map better or add more damage with pain inverter.

That is the build I'm currently using for sPvP. It is a shout build focused on retaliation and holding points. It should be pretty self-explanatory but I'd just like to add that this build is very versatile. Depending on what weapons one uses, holding points and surviving while dealing damage becomes trivial.

Yeah, I figured I wasn't really reinventing the wheel or anything because how could you not like that trait line best as a guardian. I intended this to be a solo farmer able to take out large mobs quickly away from the zerg, so the reason I wouldn't use mace/shield is all that protection slows down your retaliation damage output by 33%. The more damage you feel comfortable taking the faster you can kills stuff. Mace/Focus would be a potent choice if you want to spec 10 in toughness and blocks burn-I would probably do this if I didn't like to run full heal in WvW my guardian.